During Joe Biden’s latest town hall, the former vice president and current Democratic nominee repeated something that has become pervasive in LGBT and media reporting: “Too many transgender women of color are being murdered.” He went on to cite 33 murders of transgender women, noting that, this year, most have been persons of color.
In a recent LGBTQ Nation op-ed, Biden pledges, “As President, I will put forward comprehensive solutions to help empower the transgender and gender non-conforming community and prioritize the prosecution of anti-transgender violence.” Biden writes that he was inspired by the mid-October murder of Sara Blackwood, a transgender male from Indianapolis, Ind., who was shot while walking home from a shift at a fast-food restaurant.
Biden’s website provides a longer statement regarding this widespread belief, arguing, “These deaths don’t exist within a vacuum.” He goes on to list everything from “dehumanizing” government actions to the alleged ban of transgender people from the military to a “failure to address risk factors like domestic and intimate partner violence.” Among the list of alleged contributing factors is “underemployment and unemployment and poverty, housing insecurity, and health disparities put this community at risk.”
Here Biden tacitly admits a major weakness in the left’s repeated claims of an “epidemic” against transgender people: The issue has nothing to do with hate crimes. As with the majority of reported lethal violence since 2015 where the victim has been transgender or gender non-conforming, there is no evidence Blackwood was targeted for gender identity. Contrary to the narrative, nearly all crimes against transgender individuals are not related to their transgenderism.
Further, when Biden says he will “prioritize” prosecution of anti-transgender violence, what more is he arguing could be done? Biden argues, “President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have fueled the flames of transphobia in our nation while refusing to acknowledge the epidemic of violence” and demands that “solving the epidemic” will require a president who not only recognizes the epidemic as fact but who “believes” in the “humanity and dignity” of transgender people.
What is Biden’s solution? He vows:
My administration will enact the Equality Act to end legal discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, expand economic opportunities for LGBTQ+ people, reform our treatment of transgender and gender non-conforming individuals in our criminal justice system, ensure access to accurate identification documents, and improve government data collection to better track violence against the transgender community.
Consider what he is arguing here. The Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County already solidified the legal status of LGBT people in the workplace. The Equality Act does little to nothing more than Bostock already achieved by arguing sexual orientation and gender identity fall under the umbrella of the word “sex” in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that bans employment discrimination.
What the Equality Act does demand, however, is further degradation of religious freedom. For example, under the Equality Act, religious adoption and foster care services would be required to adhere to “affirming” LGBT placement and standards.
The legislation would also ban limiting sex-segregated spaces to biological sex and discrimination related to “public accommodation,” including in “Any establishment that provides a good, service, or program, including a store, shopping center, online retailer or service provider, salon, bank, gas station, food bank, service or care center, shelter, travel agency, or funeral parlor, or establishment that provides health care, accounting, or legal services.”
Of course, the left has aggressively demanded prisons accommodate individuals based exclusively on their gender identity, regardless of the risks to either the individual or those they are housed with. Fighting housing insecurity? Improving government tracking of violence against transgender people? Addressing health disparities and domestic violence? “Expanding” economic opportunities for LGBT people? Biden seems to be demanding action on “issues” without any compelling evidence such matters are problems in the first place — all through imposing a nationwide transgender policy via federal authority.
To understand the “violence epidemic” against transgender Americans, a recent incident is enlightening. LGBTQ Nation reported the following headline, “Police cracked jokes about a transgender hate crime victim as she bled on the floor.” The incident occurred in Philadelphia in August of this year.
The Human Rights Campaign tells of a black transgender male who was home alone with a spouse and two goddaughters when a mob broke into their house and beat the transgender person. A local TV report claimed it was, “because she was transgender.” The mob allegedly used racial and transphobic slurs.
The victim, Kendall Stephens, insisted as a consequence that transgender people fear for their lives every day and now are not even safe within their homes. Stephens even reported, as the headline implies, that at the police station officers mocked Stephens.
The reality is far from this narrative. Security footage and the victim’s report show a group of unruly people drinking and fighting outside of Stephens’s home on a city street. Stephens went outside to ask them to quiet down and called 911, to which one woman shouts at Stephens and pursues Stephens inside, beating Stephens.
Rather than ignore Stephens, the police insisted Stephens file a criminal complaint, which Stephens failed to do immediately. The case is being investigated. While Stephens was certainly the victim of a crime, there is no current evidence it was a hate crime.
The issue at hand is the dishonesty with which Biden, LGBT advocacy groups, and corporate media portray such incidents to serve as the basis for their government policies and far-reaching legal standards. As in the above example, what is told by the media simply doesn’t reflect the truth of what transgender Americans face as challenges, nor is it evidence that government intervention is even required in the first place. What policy could Biden put in place to prevent a person walking home late at night in a city from being randomly shot, or a person being targeted by an angry drunken mob on a city street outside his house because he called 911 on them?
It is the exploitation of fear by the Democratic Party, LGBT advocacy, and the media that is fueling this false sense of urgency. If all lethal violence towards transgender people is considered, including accidental deaths, police shootings, domestic violence, and even victims of mass shootings, 0.001 percent of the transgender population, less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, is affected.
We don’t need a president that easily falls for the misleading information presented by LGBT media or who agrees to perpetuate false narratives to pander to a voting bloc.
